Winning tackles challenging topics through physical performance

By Don WilkinsonContributing Writer

Thursday

Oct 25, 2018 at 12:01 AMOct 25, 2018 at 12:06 PM

Editor’s Note: Inspired by the “Beer with a Painter” feature in the Brooklyn-based online arts magazine Hyperallergic, Bart Chat (Beer+Art+Chat) features Art Beal columnist Don Wilkinson enjoying a beer and a conversation with a local artist.

I recently visited Gallery 244, the small, student-run exhibition space within the University Art Gallery and I was struck by the power of “Unforgettable Pebbles,” an eye-opening installation by graduate student Nicole Winning.

I looked at more of her impressive work online and invited her to join me for a BART Chat.

On a warm October Saturday afternoon, we sat outside at Cultivator Shoals.

Don Wilkinson: As physical as your subject is — work about the female body — there is a cerebralness or higher consciousness about it. Can you comment on that?

Nicole Winning: It stems from a long time of being a member of the yoga and meditation community; working with indigenous peoples of North and South America, and working with those who have an extended cosmology and an understanding of the human experience.

It enables me to better myself... to understand myself... and my shadows. To know my personal walking through the world. And why others are having their unique walks that are different than mine.

As a child, I was confused by the human experience. Why were there different kinds of people? Why wasn’t there a harmonious feeling? Why was there a separatism?

My experience with Eastern philosophy and indigenous cosmologies...it awakened me to an understanding of myself that wasn’t the body but something within the body and beyond the body. I came to the different aspects of mind and emotion. That is the foundation of me and I can't separate that from my work. It consumes me.

When I am interacting with other people... it’s not just that your body is there and that my body is here but there are other things going on. Your mind is happening and your emotions are happening, and my mind is happening and my emotions…

And something in between is happening and the whole world is shifting.

That shifting finds its way into my work because the body is the house of all of it. I find that performance art is the best way to talk about it. I am addressing my own female body experience... and coming to terms with the idea of self.

DW: In an artist’s statement, you talk about a past with anorexia and bulimia. In certain performances, you are nude in semi-public spaces….is this meant to be a purposeful disruption of the male gaze?

NW: Yes. Growing up with anorexia and bulimia there was an aspect of “if I don’t feel my body then I don’t have to feel what’s going on in the world.” I needed a delineation between myself and what I was feeling.

In New Bedford and in other places, I have experienced sexual assault. And rape. Now I can look at it and not be consumed by it. I look at it for what it was and then I am able to dialogue about it, instead of it being an identity put on me.

With that stance, it made me consider the male gaze, or the female gaze- it doesn't matter who’s doing the gazing — if you’re in a gaze of consumption, then you are lost in it. You’re not delineated from it.

I’m in a place where I can delineate myself from looking, I can discriminate when I look at things. There is an aspect to seeing... it’s just another body, just another person. It’s nothing that you need to consume. It’s nothing to claim. It’s like looking at art. You can analyze it simply for what it is.

I start from a male gaze point of view because it encompasses a set of experiences that I’ve been through. But it turns back to the greater looking of the human experience. When we look at things, we often get consumed. Marketing consumes us. Bodies consume us. Desires and dislikes consume us. As opposed to just being settled in the self as things really are, with all their differences.

DW: In some of your performance works — “Healing the Volcano” or “How to Build A Body,” for example, you seem to be striving to turn timidity or vulnerability into a strength. Claiming it for yourself?

NW: Yeah... in that moment of the performance, it not “me my identity” as opposed to when I’m walking down the street... that’s “me my identity.” When I’m in a performance, I’m the art object so whether I like it or not, everyone is going to bring their own consumption, whether it be a physicality consumption, a gender consumption or an artistic consumption. I can’t judge it.

I’m okay to be up there because I know where I’m coming from.

In that moment, I am the art object. I’m not a woman walking down the street who doesn’t want to be an art object.

DW: Let’s talk about “Unforgettable Pebbles.” When I walked into Gallery 244 — without reading the statement at the door — I saw the numbers stenciled on the walls. I did not know what they signified. And when I found out, I was taken aback. Can you explain this piece to the casual reader?

NW: I feel a lot of times when I talk to people about sexual assault or female marginalization or rape, in general... it’s not even there. They’re like “What are you talking about? Everything’s fine! What are you bitching about?”

That dumbfounds me. There is the aspect that is specific to the numbers of rape. I know for myself, I know for the people of New Bedford who are my friends and acquaintances that have been raped, it’s one of those things you just can’t talk about.

If we talk about in our culture, we don’t know what to do with it. We need to continually having open conversations about these things that happen to women.

I need to talk about it. It’s in our city. It’s in our world.

Don Wilkinson is a painter and art critic who lives in New Bedford. Contact him at Don.Wilkinson@gmail.com. His reviews run each week in Coastin’.